Tag Archives: labour standards

Smart procurement aims to leverage public buying power in pursuit of social, environmental and innovation goals. Socially-orientated smart procurement has been a controversial issue under EU law. The extent to which the Court of Justice (ECJ) has supported or rather constrained its development has been intensely debated by academics and practitioners alike. After the slow development of a seemingly permissive approach, the ECJ case law reached an apparent turning point a decade ago in the often criticised judgments in Rüffert and Laval, which left a number of open questions.

More recently, Bundesdruckerei and RegioPost have furthered the ECJ case law on socially orientated smart procurement and aimed to clarify the limits within which Member States can use it to enforce labour standards. This case law opens up additional possibilities, but it also creates legal uncertainty concerning the interaction of the EU rules on the posting of workers, public procurement and fundamental internal market freedoms. These developments have been magnified by the reform of the EU public procurement rules in 2014.

This freshly-released book assesses the limits that the revised EU rules and the more recent ECJ case law impose on socially-orientated smart procurement and, more generally, critically reflects on potential future developments in this area of intersection of several strands of EU economic law. The book includes four contributions by Bristol scholars, including Prof Phil Syrpis‘ perspective from an EU constitutional law standpoint, Prof Tonia Novitz‘s reflections on collective bargaining and social dumping in posting and procurement, Ms Nina Boeger‘s thoughts on public procurement and business for value, and my own views on the competition and State aid implications of the use of procurement to enforce labour standards.

The collection of essays includes additional insights by colleagues at Oxford, Cambridge, Turin, Birmingham, Leicester, Warsaw, and the UNCITRAL, and is the result of a conference held at the University of Bristol Law School in May 2016. The papers have been constantly updated and include an assessment of the agreed revision of the Posted Workers Directive in the fall of 2017.

In the Laval case (C-341/05), the capacity for minimum wages (and other work-related benefits) to be set for posted workers by collective bargaining by trade unions in the host State was cast into doubt. Collective bargaining (and the collective action that generated such bargaining) was considered to be too unpredictable in terms of effect and outcome, creating an unjustifiable barrier for the free movement of service providers. It was only in the case of ‘social dumping’, a nebulous term of uncertain reach, that collective action aimed at conclusion of a collective agreement could be permitted in respect of a particular group of posted workers. Instead, the Court relied on Article 3(1) of the Posting of Workers Directive 96/71/EC (PWD), which envisages only the setting of minimum standards in relation to certain matters. This may be done by ‘law, regulation or administrative provision’ but also by ‘collective agreements or arbitration awards which have been declared universally applicable…’ in accordance with Article 3(8) insofar as they concern’ activities listed in the Annex largely pertaining to the construction industry. EU States may also take the option to give such legal effect to universally applicable collective agreements in other sectors in accordance with Article 3(10). Through this prescriptive treatment of the appropriate limits of collective bargaining, what had been seen by some as a ‘floor of rights’ in PWD came to be a ‘ceiling’. If the national measures taken in respect of protection of the rights of posted workers did not fit within the ambit of the precise terms set out in the PWD, then they were impermissible, despite the apparent scope in Article 3(7) for a more generous interpretation of the Directive ‘more favourable to workers’. Continue reading →